Why the Norton Marketing Team is Winning Newsjacking in 2014

Was one of those brands an antivirus software company? If yes, get help. If not, keep reading to see why Norton Antivirus may be one of those brands actually worth getting a little excited about.

The antivirus software industry isn’t exactly known for innovative, creative or funny marketing campaigns. It honestly seems that most of the interaction between the majority of the population and antivirus software is clicking the “NO” box when asked to renew a 30 day trial. Fortunately, there’s nothing about any of this that means things need to stay this way. In fact, Norton may have just broken the proverbial ice with a brilliant little Facebook post.

Remember a few days ago when you couldn’t turn on your television without hearing about everyone’s favorite Canadian pop star? As one CNN anchor put it, “the most important story of the week”. In a week severely lacking subtantial news stories, like massive riots in the Ukraine, the Sochi Olympics, severe chemical spills in West Virginia, and an upcoming State of the Union address, I am glad our largest media outlets chose to focus on the news that truly matters.

But, I digress. Norton was able to brilliantly leverage this absolutely insane level of coverage to their advantageby posting the picture to the right up on their Facebook page.

Did you laugh? I definitely did when I first saw this post come up in my Facebook feed.

As of the time of this blog being written the post containing this picture onNorton’s Facebook page has reached over 14,000 likes, nearly 12,000 shares and just shy of 700 comments. For reference, the average across the last 3 visual posts by Norton would be 38 likes, 3 shares and 1 comment. I’d say the marketing team at Norton did a good job with this one!

In a year where McAfee is absolutely reeling as they attempt to rebrand into Intel Security, Norton couldn’t have chosen a better time to go viral. By going viral on Facebook Norton have likely exposed themselves to thousands of individuals they otherwise would not have reached, especially those young folks that will become the future customer base of Norton.

I just wanted to share this with all of you and I hope you got as much of a kick out of it as I did! This is really just a great example of how creativity can help in making your content stick. Norton’s marketing team took a current news bit, and instead of just writing a blog post about it decided to make a simple but funny visual piece of media out of it. Simple, but brilliantly well done, and all within Norton’s current brand scheme! I’m in content heaven, guys.

Stay creative everyone, inspire yourself every day.

To the marketing guys at Norton who drew up this great bit, keep up the great work. No pressure.”

Taken from MediaWizardz blog titled “Why the Norton Marketing Team is Winning Newsjacking in 2014″ by Michael Korolishin.

Thanks Michael. We’ve set the bar high for Norton, but we recently made some big changes to make this type of work a sustainable possibility. Hopefully this won’t be the last time you see Norton show some personality on social.

You say setting the bar high like it’s anything other than a huge positive :)

I sincerely feel there is little point in investing the effort to do something if you do not intend to do it well. I’m looking forward to seeing what your team produces in the future.

Do you think you could find the time to possibly discuss with me what inspired you and your team to take this direction with Norton’s campaigning? If you find the time, please let me know at mike.k@mediawizardz.com